Exodus [VHS]

There is a story that one Jewish critic stumbled out of the premier of this movie and pointing to the audience demanded of Preminger, the director, "Let my people go!"

Having watched Exodus its easy to understand his reaction to being stuck in a cinema with little option but to endure watching this to the end. This is a film that takes its worthiness seriously and the result is a desperately boring affair. This is not helped by what seems to have been an artistic decision to keep almost all the action off screen. This helps from a propaganda perspective of not depicting the civilian carnage, as well as British military deaths, wrought by the Israeli Irgun bombing of the King David Hotel. But it doesn't add to the entertainment value of the film. Only the prison break sequence does much to get the pulse racing.

The disputes on methods between Hagannah and Irgun are touched upon, but then skated over: the Irgun are portrayed as serene and thoroughly humane despite their adherence to terrorism. Strangely though the character based on Menachem Begin is shown as wholly untroubled by the King David bombing, which he ordered, while accounts suggest that Begin was in fact deeply affected by the civilian casulties. Though this does not appear to have dimmed his ruthlessness in the course of his subsequent career it does indicate a deeper human conflict that would have been artistically interesting to explore.

Politically the film makes some interesting points, expressing hope for a sharing of the land amongst Jews and Arabs, though the reasons why this hasn't happened are barely touched upon.

The acting in the film is a mixed bag: Paul Newman, Eva Marie Saint and Lee J Cobb are of course consummate professionals. Sal Mineo and Jill Haworth as young refugees and lovers are pretty woeful, not helped by the fact that their characters are stereotypes. The cinematography is exquisite. The score is justifiably legendary and promises something much more than the director managed to deliver. In fact it is the score rather than the director that gives the film any emotion it has.

A film to watch perhaps from an interest in cinema history, perhaps from an interest in the portrayal of Israel in contemporary cinema, perhaps for an understanding of how Americans understand Israel. Not something to watch, I think, if you want to be entertained or moved.

As the story opens in Cyprus, several hundred Jewish refugees have just been taken off a boat headed for Palestine and incarcerated in a British prison camp. Jewish activist Ari Ben Canaan (Paul Newman) decides to stage a mass escape and send them all to Palestine on a new ship, which is dubbed "Exodus." On board the ship are teen refugees Karen and Dov (Sal Mineo) and Kitty Freeman (Eva Marie Saint), an American nurse.

It was a formidable task trying to transfer the huge novel to the screen, and it isn't completely successful. Newman is an odd choice, but gives a good performance as the stalwart hero. Saint is completely wrong for her part; she's unattractive and unappealing. The script doesn't help either; their so-called romance is practically non-existent. Sal Mineo was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his convincing portrayal of a child who survived the Warsaw ghetto.

The soundtrack by Ernest Gold is magnificent and the movie is actually filmed on location. While it may be a disappointment to those who have read the book, "Exodus" is still interesting and even inspiring.

After the end of the second world war many of the survivors of the Holocaust were desperate to get out of Europe, to give themselves a fresh start and create a new life for themselves in Palestine where they would be with other Jews and feel a sense of belonging and solidarity. A very understandable aspiration given what had recently happened to them but the only problem was that there were thousands of Arabs living in Palestine who had an equal claim with the Jews to the land and both groups had lived in the country for at least two thousand years. The Arabs, looking at the rising tide of immigration from Europe understandably felt great resentment towards these newcomers and were fearful about their future if this level of immigration continued. The British had a mandate to administer the country and were saddled with the unenviable task of controlling the movement of people entering Palestine and increasingly were at the receiving end of violence from both Jews and Arabs. The British government had made promises to both sides at various times whenever it suited them which were either geared to placating Jews or Arabs and unsurprisingly were not trusted by either side. The British public and British authorities in the country became weary of their role and were anxious to withdraw from Palestine as the casualty rate of their soldiers mounted and civil unrest and bombings increased. As the day approached when the United Nations would decide whether to give independence to Palestine and create the state of Israel tension in the region intensified and Arab armies massed on the border ready to intervene if the country was granted independence.

Paul Newman in one of his finest roles plays an officer in the Haganar who organises the immigration of Jews from Europe to the "promised land", he sailed with a party aboard an old freighter called the "Exodus" and when the ship reached Palestine the immigrants told the British authorities they would go on hunger strike until death rather than return to Europe as they were ordered to.

Otto Preminger directs the film with considerable skill and conviction but it tells the story almost exclusively from the Jewish point of view and the Arab perspective does not get much consideration although it is more balanced that "Cast a Giant Shadow" in this respect. It is perhaps too long but it is still holds the attention, it is on an epic scale, is exciting and all the performances are first rate. It is sad watching the film to realise that the war in 1948 between the Arabs and the Jews shown in "Exodus" was but the first in a series of three major wars and decades of mutual hatred, mistrust, suspicion and intransigence and an unwillingness of either side to compromise that constitutes a problem that at the moment seems to be beyond the capacity of humanity to solve.